The Second Time Around (29 page)

Then he would drive to Greenwood Lake, where he and Annie would say good-bye to the Harniks and Mrs. Schafley.

I
had the radio on as I was driving home from Pleasantville, but I wasn't hearing a word of what was being said. I could not avoid the feeling that my expected presence in the Gen-stone office today contributed to the decision to abruptly close the company's doors. I also had a feeling that no matter what other business Lowell Drexel had to discuss with Charles Wallingford, he was also there to get a good look at me.

It was sheer good fortune that Betty, the receptionist, had mentioned by chance that one of the women who sorted the mail and sent out the form letters was Dr. Kendall's niece, Laura. If she had been the one assigned to respond to Caroline Summers's letter, would she have thought it interesting enough to tell Dr. Kendall about it? I wondered.

But even if she had, why wouldn't she have answered
the letter? According to company policy, all letters were to receive a response.

Vivian had said that after he learned his father's records had been taken, Nick Spencer stopped putting his appointments on the calendar. If he and Vivian were as close as the people in the office seemed to think, I wonder why he had not told her the reason for his concerns.

Didn't he trust her?

That he might not was a new, interesting possibility.

Or was he protecting her by his silence?

“Vivian Powers has been . . .”

I realized suddenly that I was not only
thinking
her name, I was
hearing
it on the radio. With a snap of my finger I turned up the volume, and then listened with growing dismay to the news report. Vivian had been found, still alive but unconscious, in her neighbor's car. The car was parked off the road in a wooded area only a mile from her home in Briarcliff Manor. It was believed that she had attempted suicide, this assumption based on the fact that there was an empty bottle of pills found on the seat beside her.

My God, I thought. She disappeared sometime between Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Could she have been in the car all this time? I was almost crossing the county line as I headed into the city. I debated for a split second, then made the next possible turn to go back to Westchester.

Forty-five minutes later I was sitting with Vivian's father in the waiting room outside the intensive care unit of Briarcliff Manor Hospital. He was crying, both
from relief and fear. “Carley,” he said, “she's slipping in and out of consciousness, but she seems not to remember anything. They asked her how old she is, and she said sixteen. She thinks she's sixteen years old. What has she
done
to herself?”

Or what has someone else done to her? I thought as I closed my hand over his. I tried to come up with some words to comfort him. “She's alive,” I said. “It's a miracle that after five days in the car she's still alive.”

Detective Shapiro was at the door of the waiting room. “We've been talking with the doctors, Mr. Desmond. There was no way your daughter was in that car for five days. We know that as recently as two days ago she was dialing Nick Spencer's cell phone number. Do you think you can get her to come clean with us?”

I
stayed with Allan Desmond for four hours, until his daughter Jane, who flew down from Boston, arrived at the hospital. She was a year or two older than Vivian, and looked so much like her that I felt a wrench of surprise when she came into the waiting room.

They both insisted I be with them when Jane spoke—or tried to speak—to Vivian. “You heard what the police said,” Allan Desmond said. “You're a journalist, Carley. Make your own decision.”

I stood with him at the foot of the bed as Jane bent over Vivian and kissed her forehead. “Hey, Viv, what do you think you're doing? We've been worried about you.”

An IV was dripping fluid into Vivian's arm. Her heartbeat and blood pressure were being recorded on a monitor over her bed. She was chalk white, and her dark hair provided a stark contrast to her complexion
and the hospital bedding. When she opened them, even though they were cloudy, I noticed again her soft brown eyes.

“Jane?” The timbre of her voice was different.

“I'm here, Viv.”

Vivian looked around then focused on her father. A puzzled expression came over her face. “Why is Daddy crying?”

She sounds so young, I thought.

“Don't cry, Daddy,” Vivian said as her eyes began to close.

“Viv, do you know what happened to you?” Jane Desmond was running her finger along her sister's face, trying to keep her awake.

“Happened to me?” Vivian was clearly trying to focus. Again, a look of confusion came over her face. “Nothing happened to me. I just got home from school.”

When I left a few minutes later, Jane Desmond and her father walked with me to the elevator. “Do the police have the nerve to think she's faking this?” Jane asked indignantly.

“If they do, they're wrong. She's not faking it,” I said grimly.

*   *   *

It was nine o'clock when I finally opened the door of my apartment. Casey had left messages on my answering machine at four, six, and eight o'clock. They were all the same. “Call me no matter what time you get in, Carley. It's very important.”

He was home. “I just got in,” I said by way of apology. “Why didn't you call me on my cell phone?”

“I did. A couple of times.”

I had obeyed the sign in the hospital to turn it off and then had forgotten to turn it on again and check for messages.

“I gave Vince your message about talking to Nick's in-laws. I must have made a convincing case—either that or hearing about Vivian Powers has shaken them up. They want to talk to you, anytime, at your convenience. I assume you've heard about Vivian Powers, Carley.”

I told him about being at the hospital. “Casey, I could have learned so much more from her,” I said. I didn't realize that I was close to tears until I heard them in my voice. “I think she wanted to talk to me, but she was afraid to trust me. Then she decided she
did
trust me. She left that message. How long was she hiding in her neighbor's house? Or did somebody see her go there?”

I was talking so fast that I was tripping over my own words. “Why didn't she use her neighbor's phone to ask for help? Did she ever make it to the car, or did somebody drive her away in it? Casey, I think she was scared. Wherever she was, she kept trying to call Nick Spencer on his cell phone. Did she believe those reports that he was seen in Switzerland? The other day when I spoke with her, I swear she believed he was dead. She couldn't have been in that car for five days. Why didn't I help her? At the time, I knew something was terribly wrong.”

Casey interrupted me. “Hold it, hold it,” he said. “You're rambling. I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

It actually took him twenty-three minutes. When I opened the door, he put his arms around me, and for the moment at least, even the terrible burden of having somehow failed Vivian Powers was lifted from my shoulders.

I think that was the moment when I stopped trying to fight being in love with Casey and trusted that maybe he was falling in love with me, too. After all, the greatest proof of love is to be there for someone when she needs you most, isn't it?

“T
his is their pool, Annie,” Ned said. “It's covered now, but when I worked here last summer for that landscaper, it was open. There were tables out on those terraces. The gardens were really pretty. That's why I wanted you to have the same thing.”

Annie smiled at him. She was starting to understand that he hadn't meant to hurt her by selling her house.

Ned looked around. It was getting dark. He hadn't intended to come onto the property, but he remembered the code to open the service gate, having watched the landscaper use it last summer. That was how he had gotten in when he torched the house. The gate was way over on the left side of the property, past the English garden. Rich people didn't want to look at the help. They didn't want their ratty cars or trucks cluttering up their driveways.

“That's why they have a buffer zone, Annie,” Ned
explained. “They plant trees just to make sure they don't have to see us come in or out. Serves them right that we can turn the tables on them. We can come in and out, and they don't even know it.”

When he was here, he had worked on the lawn, mulched the plants, and put flowers in around the pool. As a result, he knew every inch of this place.

He explained it all to Annie when he drove in. “You see, we had to use
this
gate when I worked here. See, the sign says
SERVICE ENTRANCE
. For most deliveries or for people coming to do a job, the housekeeper would have to buzz to let them in but the landscaper—that lousy guy I got in trouble for punching out—had the code. Every day we parked outside this garage. They don't use this one for anything except storing lawn furniture and that kind of stuff. Guess they won't be using it
this
year. Nobody wants to sit around a place like this, with the house gone and everything still a mess.

“There's a little bathroom with a toilet and sink at the back of the garage. That's for people like me. You don't think they're going to let us go into their house, even their pool house, do you? No way, Annie!

“The guy and his wife who cleaned this place were nice people. If we'd run into them, I'd have said something like ‘I was just stopping by to say how sorry I was about the fire.' I look nice today, so it would have been okay. But I had a feeling we wouldn't run into them, and it turns out I was right. In fact, it looks as if they're gone. There's no car. The house they used to live in is dark. The shades are down. There's no big house to take care of now. They had to use the service gate, too,
you know. All those trees are there so you don't have to look at that gate or the garage.

“Annie, I was working out here a couple of years ago when I heard that guy Spencer on the phone telling people that he knew this vaccine worked, that it would change the world. Then last year when I was here for just those couple of weeks, I kept hearing the other guys saying they had bought the stock and that it had doubled in value and was still going up.”

Ned looked at Annie. Sometimes he could see her very clearly; other times, like now, it was like seeing her shadow. “Anyhow, that's the way it happened,” he said.

He went to take her hand, but even though he knew it was there, he couldn't feel it. He was disappointed, but he didn't want to show it. She was probably still a little mad at him. “It's time to go, Annie,” he said finally.

Ned walked past the pool, past the English garden, and through the wooded area to the service road where he'd parked the car in front of the garage, which was where they stored the lawn furniture. “Want to take a look before we go, Annie?”